Anne Collier at Galerie Neu

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Galerie Neu, Berlin

New York- based artist Anne Collier’s work explores the complexities of representation and perception by questioning the primal relationship between photographic objects and images, taking into focus the nature of photography itself. Her artistic practice involves gathering and investigating objects that are dominated by a certain highly emotive imagery: eyes, clouds, waves, images of blunt and romanticised sexism. Often sourcing her visual vocabulary from 1970s and 80s media, such as vintage magazines, advertising, and LP album covers, the artist recontextualizes and thus reformulates the original context in order to create unique aesthetics and narratives of her own.

In her Women Crying series (2016), for example, Anne Collier crops and enlarges pictures of crying women on LP album covers from the 1950s to the 1980s. While the original imagery shows a feeble and romanticised staging of feminity – coherent with most of the titles of the albums like „You make little girls cry“ (Daniele Alexander, 1980), „To See My Angel Cry / That’s When She Started to Stop Loving You“ (Conway Twitty, 1970) or „15 Tear Jerkers“ (Various artists, 1978), the cutouts encourage one to reflect this very staging. Through an act of appropriation, Anne creates a female recipocral gaze on the subjectification of women and womenhood in the medium of photography.

It is always an analytic, almost clinically rational perspective that Anne Collier takes towards her objects of investigation, devoid of any form of sentimentality. This can also be observed in her works Tripod (2016) and 35 MM / 2 ¼” (2016), showing magazine advertisements for cameras and camera equipment with an imagery of more than ostentatious sexism in the neutral space of her studio. Anne Collier undertakes an autopsy of the material, thus creating a paradox between the original intentions of the investigated objects and the absolute control and precission of a studio photography context. She resignifies the imagery of our near past.

Anne Collier was born in 1970 in Los Angeles, USA. She lives and works in New York. Her work has been shown in numerous international solo and group exhibitions, including the SFMoMA – San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2016), Centre Pompidou (2016), Fondazione Prada (2016), Aspen Art Museum (2015), Art Gallery of Ontario, Ontario (2015), and the Museum of Contemporary Art of Chicago (2014), as well as the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; ICA, London; Guggenheim Museum, New York and Bilbao; MoMA, New York, Palais de Tokyo, Paris. Her works are in the collections of the Guggenheim, MoMA and the Whitney Museum of American Art. This is her first solo show at Galerie Neu.